High potential. Elevated to high performance.
You're at an inflection point.
The stakes are higher. Complexity has multiplied. What worked before won’t scale.
For founders and scale-up teams turning early success into repeatable, sustained growth.
For leaders and standout individuals operating in arenas where judgement, presence and execution truly matter.
If you recognise yourself in either - or both - you’re in the right place.
Meet Jonathan Stern
Ex Leader: MuleSoft | Informatica | Integrated Research APAC | IBM WebSphere
ICF Certified Coach | Gallup CliftonStrengths Certified Coach
Board advisor | Growth catalyst
From Leader to Coach: I’ve been there
For most of my career, I was in your seat.
I built teams. I’ve scaled businesses through hyper-growth. I’ve navigated an IPO. I’ve led through a major acquisition. At MuleSoft, I grew the ANZ business from US$1.9m to US$40m in six years.
I know what it's like when everything moves fast. When you're expected to do more with less. When every hire matters. When one misstep sets you back months.
I also know the difference a great coach makes. I had one who changed my trajectory.
Coaching is a passion born from lived experience. And this experience has helped:
high-potential companies grow dramatically enabling their founders to achieve their goals, and
high-potential individuals become high-performing leaders.
Scaling the business
I help founder-led and scale-up organisations grow.
This work is grounded in lived operating experience. I led MuleSoft ANZ from US$1.9m to US$40m ARR over six years.
I have a method, a formula, a framework. Based on fundamentals that actually scale:
Go-to-market clarity and execution
Bar-raising hiring and leadership leverage
Sales discipline, forecasting, and decision quality
Operating rhythm as complexity increases
I’ve led businesses through establishment, hyper-growth, IPO, acquisition, and integration. I now apply this expertise to benefit my clients.
Where is your organisation on their growth trajectory? And, amongst the millions of things to do, what are the priorities?
Click on this button and complete 21 simple questions, to get a personalised scale-up assessment to help you answer these.
Growing the leader
I work one-on-one with individuals & leaders who are at an inflection point in their careers.
Many are future founders, functional stars, stellar salespeople or rising executives. Without support, they often follow the default path.
With focused coaching, we set a new trajectory.
My approach combines my “walked in their shoes” experience with my professional coaching certifications. During my leadership career, I “punched above my weight” to reach senior positions in IBM and Informatica and MuleSoft / Salesforce. And many of the people I coached along the way, went on to far higher levels.
The work is practical and personal:
Building confidence, judgement, and presence under pressure
Learning how to lead effectively as the stakes rise
Overcoming limiting beliefs
And almost always, improving communication becomes a catalyst
At the core is a strengths-based approach. Self-aware leaders stand out above the rest. When leaders understand and apply their strengths with intent, performance compounds. For them and for their people.
“Jonathan has a rare ability to establish structured foundations while continuously improving them. He leads by learning, tuning and refining as he goes. An approach that benefits his coaching clients – just as it did at MuleSoft.”
Greg Schott | Global CEO, MuleSoft
“Whether it was our leadership skills, our ways of working, or the bar-raising people he helped us hire, we found Jonathan uniquely qualified for this revenue scale-up coaching. He's maniacally focused on his customer's outcomes, he's a Strengths-based coach, and he's been-there-and-done-it. He's walked in our shoes.”
Jure Brkan | CEO, Innovior
“Jonathan's ability to break down complex business issues/ processes into simple, relatable and manageable pieces, giving you the ability overcome any obstacle, proved invaluable.”
Alex Haloulos | Head of Strategic Sales, BMC Software
“It isn’t just the fact that Jonathan comes with such a wealth of expertise, it’s the way he applies it….. Jonathan helped implement a program of incremental gains which fuelled growth, increased win rates, transitioned us to a strengths-based organisation and a more predictable business…..”
Lisa Michael | Director Probe CX
When Jonathan joined MuleSoft as our ANZ leader in 2014, our local business comprised of a handful of people in one large room in North Sydney. Jonathan recognises that the key to all great businesses is to hire great people and then lead them by coaching and mentoring - and this is exactly what he did. With those tenets in place he led that team in acquiring new customers, building resilient processes and focusing on ensuring customer success.
The foundation he created enabled us to deliver exponential growth and expand to all major A/NZ cities. MuleSoft successfully IPO'd in March 2017 and was acquired by Salesforce in 2018.
And Jonathan has gone on to apply the skills he refined at MuleSoft to benefit his coaching clients.”
Will Bosma | Asia Pacific Vice-President MuleSoft
“Jonathan displays on a daily basis all of the best aptitudes as a coach, a mentor, a supporter and a leader.”
Lawrence Russell | NZ Lead, Snowflake Software
“Jonathan is a true coach - he gets your best to shine through. If you are looking for a true coach who knows how to get your best to shine through - then Jonathan is it! I would highly recommend him to others.”
Kat Carter | NZ Market Leader, Cognizant
Scaling the business. The scale-up pyramid.
A proven system for sustainable growth
Most successful scale-ups rely on the same underlying building blocks, whether they articulate them or not.
This is a practical framework, cherry-picked from lived experience, distilling the components I’ve seen repeatedly in organisations that scale successfully over time. Those components sit across three core dimensions - People | Execution | Planning - and progress relaibly stalls when any one of them falls out of balance. The goal isn’t to do everything at once, but to focus on what matters most at each stage of growth.
Click on the components below to explore each one.
PEOPLE EXECUTION PLANNING
Forecasting
